Was william f buckley gay

William F. Buckley, Jr. Bush he called their Iraq war a failure. Schultz, Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixtiespresents its subjects as friend-foes with an outsize impact on their time. Put these together with the fact that a major biography of Buckley is being written by Sam Tanenhaus, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review —and that another biography has been backed by the Buckley Program at Yale, itself a recent addition to the Buckley legacy—and it is a lot of attention being paid to a man who died seven years ago.

The interest may, in fact, be fueled by overstatement. Buckley certainly hated Vidal, but not, I think, for being gay. He hated him for ridiculing his supreme values—Catholicism and the Market. Sexual innuendo had been introduced from the first of their broadcasts, when Vidal said he had modeled his transsexual fictional heroine, Myra Breckinridge, on Buckley.

Buckley regretted agreeing to appear with Vidal, and tried to get out of his contract with ABC before moving from the Miami convention to Chicago, but the network was william f buckley gay him to it. His frustration mounted as he was constrained to continue where he did not want to be.

Before Buckley launched his threat to punch Vidal, he rose partly from his chair, which has been interpreted as a lunge toward Vidal, the better to punch him. Buckley later had the good sense to be ashamed of his outburst and to avoid all mention of it. That Buckley was a homophobe would have come as a surprise to his many openly gay friends, some of whom I met with him, on his boat and elsewhere.

But Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquireinvited the two to continue brawling in his pages, and they unwisely accepted. A more ambitious project is Kevin M. He argues that the s was a placid time narcotized by Eisenhower. When chaos broke out in the s, the two men pulled back from the violence they had created.

But had they created it?

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “The Problems of Gay Life”

The upsetting of the old order was accomplished mainly by the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, and the anti-war movement. Those three things, and the vehement opposition to them, did the real churning of the waters; and Buckley and Mailer were only briefly and peripherally involved in them.

The real troublemakers were people like Martin Luther King, Jr. These deeply committed people with real followings had little time for the filigreed warblings of Buckley or Mailer. Deep to deep? Rather, flamboyant shallow to flamboyant shallow. Buckley and Mailer did not make history.

They made good copy. Yet Yale too, with the founding of its William F. Buckley first became known for attacking Yale just after he graduated from the school. In God and Man at Yalehe argued that a university should get its authority from being in loco parentis, and since his parent, the oil millionaire William F.

Buckley, Sr. Since it did not do so, his father and other parents should stop donating to Yale. The argument was deeply silly, but it caused an enormous backlash. McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate about to become a Harvard professor, mounted a full attack on the book in The Atlantic in November